Wow. That was an insane evening.

I was seated towards the back of the room at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. I heard the ruckus in the hallway, the sound of something falling, tables maybe. I saw people start to get on the ground, so I immediately followed suit.

In that moment, I remembered what they taught me at the State Department, find an exit. That’s the training. Mass shootings, bombs, active threats, get out of there. I didn’t know what this was. I could smell something like smoke.

And when I got under the table, I realized the tables were packed so tightly together that I couldn’t move. I hadn’t mapped the room when I arrived. I didn’t know where the nearest exit was.

“Idiot. How could I have forgotten to map the exit?”

So I stayed. Staying under the table felt like my only chance of survival.

I texted my husband.

8:35 p.m.: Something scary is happening.

8:35 p.m.: I’m under a table.

8:35 p.m.: I’m really scared.

8:35 p.m.: Tell the kids I love them if something happens.

8:44 p.m.: I’m okay.

It had felt almost surreal to be going to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in the first place, especially as a local journalist. Honestly, at some point it started to feel like a consolation prize. It had been a rough week. An editor I cared about deeply lost their job. I thought, at least this, a reprieve, something you only see once in a lifetime.

This wasn’t exactly the once-in-a-lifetime experience I had imagined. And I hope it actually is once in a lifetime.

But it gave me something, solidarity. With the Americans who experience this all over the country. The terror. The fear. The shaking you don’t even realize is happening. The shock, then the slow realization, then the wave — wanting to cry, wanting to be held.

I hugged a stranger. We held each other because we were both still alive. She took a picture with me. I don’t know where that photo is. I don’t remember her name.

They tried to keep the dinner going. But people had already started to leave.

This is America, 2026.

Instinct

And then, in the middle of all of it, the only thought I could hold onto was, “I need to fucking report this.”

I watched my colleague, a straight badass/crazy dude, Tyrone, get up immediately and run toward the story. I got up too. And you could tell, in that room, who the journalists were. Because the journalists (once they realized they were still alive) went reflexive. Straight into action. Telling the story that needed to be told. No pause, no permission.

But I still ebbed and flowed. I wanted to cry at one point. I decided to hold it together.

I got angry at one point. I decided to set that down too.

My body was shaking and I didn’t even realize it.

Everyone in that room knew it was going to be a tense night for multiple reasons. People protesting the president’s actions.

There was also a lot of petty things.

Tensions between higher list celebrities and others. At one point, certain people spent too long on the red carpet so they held others outside in the rain for extended periods.

But when the shooting started, all the hierarchy, all the status, all the credentialing and table placement and who’s-who dissipated. None of it mattered. We were all just people trying to survive, trying to get home to the people we loved.

Home

I filed a short story for national.

It’s 1:35 a.m. now. I just got into bed.

My three-year-old woke up and climbed into my bed.

I have never been so happy to be disturbed in my life.

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I got my dress for $68 from Rent the Runway.

The fabric is thinner than I hoped.

Not that anyone at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner would comment, but it says something about how I got here. A few borrowed pieces. A connection. A newsroom that doesn’t have a stylist, makeup artist or a budget for appearances like this. Just enough to show up.

I’m a local reporter.

Right now, our newsroom has four reporters. We’re supposed to be hiring one more. We cover millions of people across multiple counties. On Monday, I shadowed a local political candidate as they knocked on doors. Last Saturday, I moderated a candidate forum in another jurisdiction entirely. On Tuesdays, I usually go to council meetings — but because I cover multiple jurisdictions, I wake up and check the agendas to decide who needs to see me more that day. Last week, I got a scoop: I found out Amazon was the end user of a massive data center project dividing a county. I spend almost every day trying to make sense of policies that are often decided far above the communities that live with them.

In our tiny newsroom, we collaborate heavily. We stretch everything. And somehow, we still manage to do the job. But I remember when the newsroom had nearly 20 reporters.

And preparing to step into a room like the White House Correspondents’ Dinner makes me feel the gap.

I feel it in the scale. In the resources. In the quiet pang of envy my gut has understanding that some newsrooms in that room have hundreds, sometimes thousands, of reporters, entire teams dedicated to topics I’m covering alone. The industry hasn’t just shrunk. It’s consolidated. And if you’re a local reporter right now, it can feel like you represent something that’s slowly disappearing.

A dying breed.

That’s the part people don’t always see when they look at events like this. The gowns, the photos, the optics of power and proximity. Underneath all of it is an industry that has been hollowing out for years. Newsrooms closing. Reporters laid off. Beats disappearing. And yet the work hasn’t gone away. If anything, it’s gotten harder. And more important.

My beat is Maryland politics, which is never really just local and never really just politics.

The decisions that shape people’s lives — job loss, rising utility bills, access to services, the strain on local governments — are often driven by federal policy and international pressures. In a place like the DMV, federal decisions land in your yard and your neighbors’.

I see it in food lines, the ones I visited multiple times during the record-breaking government shutdown.

I see it in the unemployed and retired National Institutes of Health workers who still protest federal cuts almost every weekend, though the cameras are long gone.

I see it in utility prices rising as the war rages on and local infrastructure struggles to keep up with sharing a grid with the data center capital of the world.

I see it in frustration of local government officials, scrambling to respond to decisions they frequently remind us they didn’t make.

Those are the stories we cover. Those are the stories I carry with me into a room like the correspondents dinner.

I hear people plan to wear “Free Press” pins this year. A statement. A signal of solidarity. I understand it. I believe in it. And I’ve worked in places where press freedom didn’t exist, and its complete absence left the public fending for themselves, by themselves.

And yet I feel a tension.

Apart from my fear of poking holes in this rented dress, it’s hard to talk about a free press when you’re watching the industry contract in real time. When talented journalists are losing their jobs. When your newsroom is doing everything it can just to maintain coverage.

Freedom can’t only mean protection from external pressure. It also means having the resources to actually do the work. And right now, that part feels fragile.

As a Black journalist, that fragility cuts deeper. The opportunities that are shrinking never fully stabilized for people like me in the first place.

So I’ve adapted. I’ve changed my style, learned new formats, built an audience in ways that weren’t expected of reporters before. I’ve done what I had to do to keep going. Because the alternative isn’t really an option.

There’s a conversation happening across the industry about independence, about going out on your own, building something new. I’ve thought about it.

But there’s also a reason institutions still matter.

Some of the interviews I’ve done have left men red in the face, screaming threats at me. Others have caused people to plaster my face online, hoping to drive hatred my way. In those moments, having an institution behind you, however frail, matters. Legal protection isn’t just a perk. Some days it’s the only way this job can be done.

So I’ve stayed. And I’ve balanced. And I’ve kept showing up.

That’s what this dinner represents to me.

Yes, it’s glamorous. Yes, there’s proximity to power. But more than anything, I need to show up. Show up as a local reporter in a room that isn’t always built for me. Show up carrying stories that don’t always make it into national conversations. Show up knowing that the work matters, even when the structure around it feels like it’s crumbling.

I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know how long before layoffs or circumstances change my course. But right now, I’m here, on behalf of the people in these counties. The ones who feel the impact of policy. The ones whose stories don’t stop just because a newsroom shrinks.

So I’ll go to the dinner.

I’ll put on this beautiful red dress and admire how the colors accentuate my dark skin.

And I’ll show up.

Because that’s what I’ve been doing. That’s what we do.

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She paused, her eyes narrowing at me as she adjusted her glasses.

“You overanalyze things. How did you even get there? You do this a lot.”

I felt myself shrink into my seat. Normally, I loved that English class. I beamed when my teacher announced that I was the only fifth grader in her class to get a perfect score on the standardized exam. I not only read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer there, I found myself trying to draft colloquial language for the first time so I could write like Mark Twain.

But that criticism seared into my mind. Even now, as an adult, I can have valid concerns and still have to stop and wonder, “Am I thinking too much? Am I overanalyzing this?”

The truth is, maybe I am. And sometimes I do. But I’ve come to see this trait as a strength to lean into rather than a critique to correct—particularly in my work as a reporter, where it allows me to recognize patterns within the reporting and in human behavior, so I can ask questions that get to the why as opposed to just the what.

Analysis has become the bedrock of my social media style, growing my following to more than 20k people in a little over six months across Instagram and TikTok.

And it’s what I have used with my reporting on data centers, the massive buildings going up across the country to power artificial intelligence. If you’ve been following, I’ve spent months reporting on this subject from different angles. The DMV has become ground zero for data center development, hosting the largest concentration of them in the world, less than an hour from where I live. I’ve grown fascinated with all parts of it.

These are my broad thoughts on the subject, summarized in five points.

1. It’s not just a tech story

The data center story connects to so many things. It’s a power and influence story. A water story. A land use story. A community movement story. An energy story. An economic growth story. A local accountability story. And a national security story. These data centers are changing the American landscape at a rapid pace.

2. The data center resistance is a coalition you wouldn’t expect

Few things have brought Americans together quite like opposition to data centers. Socialist groups angry about surveillance and corporate power. Environmentalists fighting air pollution and water depletion. Residents who just opened their electric bill and want to know why it doubled. Conservatives pissed about eminent domain and transmission lines cutting through their farmland.

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3. Local movements have gone national

The resistance in Prince George’s County that led to a moratorium was one of the first, but it has spread. County after county has followed. Now Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are calling for a national pause on data center development. What started in community meetings is now in Congress.

4. The push to build is not stopping

Utility and generation companies stand to receive a massive payday. AI firms have billions in investment behind them. Local officials are looking for tax revenue and infrastructure dollars. AI leaders are literally discussing building data centers in space. That tells you everything you need to know about how intense the will is, among some very powerful and very wealthy groups, to keep this moving forward.

5. Americans are weighing the costs and benefits of AI

There’s no question that artificial intelligence is changing the way people live and work, and increasingly people are turning to it for all kinds of reasons. But they’re also asking real questions about what AI demands from them and what they’re actually getting in return.

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Each of these points can take you on a journey through your own thoughts. And in many instances, your ideas may be more “overanalytical” than anything I would come up with. (I’ve seen some of the comments on the stories, Lol.)

I hope this helps as we collectively think through some of the issues impacting us today.

My fifth-grade self would be relieved to know that the thing she was told to fix turned out to be something worth keeping.

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Maybe I’m getting old, but they looked like kids.

With their blue hair, acne-laced faces, and septum piercings. But I suppose it takes a bit of the idealism that is granted through youth to arrange protests against some of the most powerful forces in the United States.

For the last few months, I have been covering a community uprising that sprouted in a Maryland suburb that most people can’t even find on a map. In a lot of ways it is reflective of protests that are sprouting up across the country.

If there was a man versus machine story to be told in 2026, this fight against AI data centers is it. There’s complexity, nuance, and tons of layers.

The symbol of tech hate

Data centers are massive warehouses filled with computer servers that power everything from your email to ChatGPT to TikTok. For a lot of people, they have become the physical representation of everything they hate about technology.

The hyperscale ones are sprouting up around the country at a rapid pace. I can’t think of another type of development going up as quickly and with as much capital as data centers. No malls. No office buildings. No restaurants.

And funny enough, northern Virginia in the DMV region has become ground zero for this. The area makes up about 13% of all reported data center operational capacity globally. And developers started the process of building them out in Maryland.

Why am I so obsessed with data centers?

But surprisingly, different groups in Maryland have formed unusual alliances and collectively pushed back on these developments.

And in covering this topic, I have become obsessed. Mostly because I tend to want to understand complex systems around me, and this shit is an incredible web of special interests.

I wonder how to get everyone to pause and see what I see. On one side you’ve got the obvious suspects, developers, certain politicians, union reps looking for construction jobs. On the other, the strangest coalition I’ve ever seen, socialists, farmers, environmentalists, and people who just opened their electricity bill and lost their minds.

You also have a few parties that don’t fit neatly into for or against, but are complex players with a big role in this fight — like PJM Interconnection, the electric grid operator for the mid-Atlantic.

I have done on and off the record interviews with people from all sides of this and I can confidently say that most people who are protesting have no idea what they are up against. It is insane to me that I happen to be the local reporter at this moment, at ground zero, documenting all of this in real time. Being let into something most people can’t yet see, and trying to figure out how to make them see it.

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Caught at an inflection point

I feel like I have a habit of being places during rare inflection points. As a college student, I left Cairo right before the revolution that overthrew Mubarak. During my time in Turkey, the Gezi Park protests broke out, one of the largest movements to restore democratic rule. While in the Gulf States, I found myself at the forefront of the end of the war in Afghanistan, as Qatar became the landing point for over 100,000 Afghans fleeing the Taliban takeover.

If you haven’t been paying attention, the United States is at an inflection point in so many ways. And a lot of the action happens to be right where I live in the DMV. What happens with the midterms, what happens with AI, what happens with data centers, and what happens with these protests will steer the country into its next era and significantly shape the reality our children experience.

Each day I have been writing a page, documenting what I am learning from interviews. I’m not sure what it will all turn into — a book? A podcast series? Neither? Both?

What I do know is that every time I untangle a piece of this web, I have a hard time sleeping.

In a 1962 New York Times essay, James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

That’s what I’m trying to do here. Help people face it. Face it myself. All of it.

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If you have ever watched a bull ride, you know the moment I mean. The pen hasn’t opened yet, and the rider is already gripping the back of that animal, knowing they’re about to get tossed and turned and thrown in directions the human spine was never meant to bend. They know they need to hold on for dear life while trying not to break a bone or make any other fatal mistake. They know they’re crazy for picking this ride, but the adrenaline and the rising stakes firm their grip. Everything they’ve trained for must rush to the front of their mind, because it’s now or never.

That was me last Sunday.

I had taken a two-week break from work over the holidays, but somehow I knew upon returning that I needed to be ready to ride that damn bull. As a political reporter covering the legislative session, elections, and an avalanche of other stories in a shifting media environment and world, I assumed 2026 would be a year for the history books. After watching the United States unseat the leader of Venezuela, sitting with a governor vying for reelection, and clicking on a video showing a woman shot by a federal agent (all within my first week back) I feel, for better or worse, that I was right.

I imagine this year feels similar for a lot of Americans. So in preparation for this bull ride of a year, I’ve done a few things I think will help me, and maybe others, survive.

1. Finding Routine in Chaos

I’ve set a morning routine that involves exercise and quiet. The news cycle is completely chaotic. Everything from international norms to vaccine schedules is changing. Whether it’s morning or evening, you may want to carve out something you can protect, something that keeps you grounded and feels constant. I get up at 5:30, get ready, and run. I purposely don’t check my phone or messages at that time so I’m not distracted or slowed down. The world will still be on fire when I’m done lacing my shoes.

2. Setting Personal Goals

I’ve also set some goals. Some involve work, others involve learning to be more present as a mom and a partner. The latter is actually what I struggle with more. My mind frequently wanders to things I could or should be doing when my kids want me to sit with them and play dinosaur puzzles. As a very serious person who does not enjoy kid games, I had to ask ChatGPT for activities I could do with my children that I would actually enjoy. These are goals I had to not only set but plan out in detail. But the forced balance keeps me grounded even as the world seems to spin around me.

3. Guarding Your Focus

And I’ve started worrying only about what I can control. This is probably the most controversial thing I’ve done, choosing to fiercely guard my focus. If problems in the office are above my pay grade, I stay in my lane. If fifty stories are breaking at once, I pick what I can cover and finish it. I get messages almost every day from people wanting me to cover this or that—real problems, things I wish I could take on—but I know I have to focus. Even if the world is burning, my kid may need a snack. And I’ve got to focus and cut those apple slices.

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What Does it Feel Like On the Bull Ride?

I recently met with a gentleman from another news network. We had worked together on a large story years ago. It had been years since we’d seen each other, and I could tell that life (and probably the news cycle) had aged him some.

He described how hard it was to stay in love with his work, keeping up with everything going on nationally while navigating the demands of internal station politics in a shifting media landscape. But then he pointed to some stories he had recently worked on, pieces so vivid and meaningful that I remembered them instantly. I had come across them months ago, and they had stayed with me.

And I guess that’s what it means to stay on the bull. We’re riding—finding the beauty in the pain, the strength in the challenge, the courage in the insanity, and resilience through the changes.

YEEE-HAWWWW!

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The handle of the silver cooking pot jutted out of the bathroom sink. That’s what triggered my flashback to fourth grade, back to years as a homeless child that I’d long forgotten. The pot. My mind suddenly zoomed out and I could see her, really see her, living in this Red Roof Inn.

I stepped back mentally, taking in the room. Plastic storage bins stacked to higher than my waist. Medication bottles colonizing every horizontal surface. A laundry basket wedged between hanging coats near the sink, clean clothes draped across the comforters in careful piles. She couldn’t have a storage unit, I thought to myself. Everything appeared to be here.

The pot helped my mind start to see through the pieces of her life. Her plug-in stove top hidden between boxes and medication containers on the counter, the white air fryer not too far away from it. Her kitchen. Where she made dinner for her son.

And then I heard the mouse. Maybe two. Unwelcome residents. Or perhaps we were the unwelcome ones—they seemed even more entrenched in the place than she was. They would certainly remain when she left. She jumped every time she heard them, and her jumps made my heart palpitate too. I could see her jumping while she tried to cook.

Neither Here Nor There

For six months, I’ve been oscillating. Re-anchoring myself in journalism like this, in motel rooms, food lines, and more. Bearing witness. Then there’s social media, trying to stretch myself into uncharted territory on online. Building a “personal brand” while producing the work that reminds people why they need news in the first place. Craving the freedom and security that comes with a following, while feeling disgusted by what we’ve all sacrificed to the attention economy. It’s a lot of back-and-forth of the mind.

I imagine people in almost every industry are dealing with some form of this. Finding ourselves in this new economy. What keeps me grounded is the work itself. And lately, watching the cautionary tales unfold.

Olivia Nuzzi—the journalist who became the story, allegedly involved with a presidential candidate she was covering (maybe two). In some perverse way, she’s winning. Attention, after all, is currency now. But she’s also a warning about what happens when you lose your footing in a shifting industry.

The question isn’t whether the ground is moving. It is. The question is what you root yourself with while it does.

Resisting the Algorithm

Earlier this year, I wrote about my TikTok experiment. I was deeply uncomfortable with the platform, but the data didn’t care about my comfort. One in five people now use it as a primary news source, a number that keeps rising. Facebook and Instagram claim even more news consumers. With AI killing website traffic, social media is the medium of the hour for publishers.

I started at zero in July. I’m approaching 10,000 followers now, outpacing my peers in national and reaching audiences who’ve never heard of WAMU or NPR.

But I’m far from finding my footing. I constantly wade too deep into one style, one mode, and have to pull myself back because I could feel my ‘footing getting unsteady,’ forgetting what I was doing this all for as I obsessed over the algorithms.

For me, the most powerful recalibration is returning to places like the room in the Red Roof Inn. Rooms with pots in bathroom sinks and mice in the walls. They remind me why I gave news a shot in the first place, so that people like her—people who remind me of my own family at a particular point in history—could understand what was happening in the systems that governed their lives. Could hold the powerful accountable.

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Who Signed Us Up For This?

And for me to reach that goal,...sometimes that means standing in the Red Roof Inn. Sometimes it means standing in rooms where people’s titles don’t fit on business cards. Sometimes it means being on TikTok. Sometimes it means doing what you have to do to build a following, to keep your job, to survive.

We’re living through an era of economic evolution that demands constant rebalancing. The ground is shifting beneath all our feet—journalists, teachers, doctors, technicians, politicians, anyone whose profession is being reshaped by technology, attention, and economics beyond our control. It’s like we are all suddenly part of something we didn’t want to sign up for.

Just don’t lose your footing. Know what you’re rooted to. Find the pot in the sink and use it as a moment to recalibrate and anchor yourself.

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Where I live, you can probably throw a stone and it’ll hit a federal worker. That’s how grounded we are in the federal government here in the DMV. For decades, that’s been DC’s superpower, the thing that made this region different from every other American city. While the rest of the country rode the waves of boom and bust, the DMV stayed steady. Almost recession-proof. The government always needs people, and those people need coffee shops and daycares and dry cleaners and bars. It was an ecosystem built on one fundamental assumption. Stability.

That assumption is cracking.

I’m a reporter here, which means I’m both documenting this moment and living through it. Some weeks I’m not sure which role is more exhausting. What I can tell you is this, DC has become ground zero for a particular kind of American instability, and it’s breeding a quiet anxiety that blankets this city like nothing I’ve witnessed before.

What DC Was

To understand what’s happening now, you need to understand what DC used to be, what it attracted, and who it drew in.

This city filled itself with a particular type of person, the altruistic public servant. I bold altruism because I truly feel like it seeps within the bones of so many people here. People who want to feel connected emotionally to meaningful work.

Getting a federal job here used to be the jackpot for people who weren’t chasing jackpots. It attracted a different kind of dreamer — not the Silicon Valley disrupter, not the Wall Street climber, but the public servant who wanted to feel tethered to something larger than themselves. You didn’t come here to be rich; you came here to build a life. A family. A mortgage. A sense of meaning. (Then of course there’s the power hungry people.)

The Shift

I won’t rehash everything that’s happened—the funding cuts, the federal worker firings, DC losing autonomy, the National Guard and ICE presence that’s become almost background noise, the clashes between Governor Wes Moore and the administration, the gutting of NIH and FDA in nearby Montgomery County. If you’re reading this, you probably already know the list. It grows every week.

But what doesn’t get enough attention is the psychological toll. And I think that is because it is harder to report on.

Anxiety looks surprisingly quiet.

People carry it. They don’t scream it. You sometimes see it in yard signs or bumper stickers. Maybe you hear it at happy hour. You feel it in the air—this sense that everyone is waiting for something else to happen, for the next shoe to drop, for everything to come crashing down.

I have a rule now: give it ten minutes. Go to any bar, any cafe, any playground in this city, strike up a conversation with someone, and within ten minutes you’ll get to the anxiety. You’ll get to the administration. You’ll get to the cuts. You’ll get to something that’s been changed, shaken, upended, something that person is carrying on their shoulders whether they want to or not.

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What Quiet Anxiety Looks Like

I recently met a furloughed federal worker at a playground where my kid was playing. It was the second time I’d seen him, so we had that tentative “friendly acquaintance” thing going. But this second time we met he opened the conversation with: “Did you see the Nobel Peace Prize discussion?”

That was the thing irking him that day. Not whether he’d have a job next month. The Nobel Prize discussion. Somehow I knew, this conversation was not really about the Nobel Prize. It was about everything else he couldn’t control.

At a happy hour last week, I was talking to a woman who mentioned she’s a lawyer. About ten minutes in (there’s that rule again) she told me she’s been defending people who she believes were wrongfully arrested. Not as a one-off. As a pattern. Because of what she called “the siege that DC is under,” she’s now routinely taking on cases that she says never would have been problems before.

Living It While Covering It

There’s a heightened blanket sense of anxiety that didn’t exist here. It’s shared by the community whether you work in the federal sector or not.

I wish I could offer reassurance or a clear path forward. I can’t. What I can tell you is that we’re not through this. The system of DMV is shifting, and it’s not clear yet what it will become.

There are rumors of recessions. Rumors of a housing crisis. Rumors of mass exodus. Rumors of a lot of possible things. Some will materialize, others won’t. But all of them hang in the air, adding to that collective anxiety.

The only certainty is this, we’re living through a period of the nation’s capital’s history that will be studied, analyzed, and debated for decades. Future historians will mark this as the moment something changed.

The people here right now? They’re just trying to get through each day, each week, each month. They’re trying to figure out if the stability they were promised will ever return.

And mostly, they’re carrying this quiet anxiety, waiting to see what comes next.

Bonus

I was going to leave this heavy, but what better levity to bring than that from the legendary Diane Keaton, may she RIP.

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A few months ago, I was standing outside waiting to meet my agent and tour another home outside of my family’s budget (we all do it). Despite all the commotion about job loss in the region, at this point, the last two homes we bid on went for about $100k over asking to full cash buyers in typical DMV real estate market fashion. That’s when a sprightly elderly couple walked by, saw me, and assumed they needed to intervene and save me.

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“Are you alright? Is this man bothering you?” the woman said, gesturing toward my agent.

That’s how I met “Grace” (the nickname I’ll give her for the purposes of this newsletter).

After we all laughed off the misunderstanding—my agent wasn’t harassing me, just doing his job—Grace and her partner asked what I was up to. When I explained I was house hunting, their eyes lit up.

“Well, we’re actually thinking about selling,” they said, almost conspiratorially.

Since then, Grace and I stayed in touch. Then one day, she called. Her daughter lived on the other side of the country, and after three decades in the same house, Grace was ready to make the move west. Did I want to see her place?

Of course, I braced for disaster. The house would be falling apart. The price would be astronomical. Something would go terribly wrong because that’s just how these things work in the real world.

Well,...

The house was lovingly maintained for over 30 years. The price? Below market. And even though the agent shopped the home off-market to other interested buyers, Grace held the house for me. She said she looked up my background online and decided I was “perfect for this place.”

“I’m waiting for Jenny’s offer,” she told her agent.

It was unbelievable.

I watched this woman do something I wasn’t sure people in the world still did, choose heart over the highest bidder. It was personal, intimate, serendipitous. Like something you’d see in a movie. But it was happening to me.

I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. It never did.

Now I’m officially a Maryland homeowner, here to stay—at least for now.

We signed over ownership together, and the title company said this was the first time in over 15 years they did something like that.

One of the most difficult pieces of journalism I ever wrote told my story of feeling invisible to educators during multiple periods of housing insecurity as a child. And it has been quite the journey watching the transience of my childhood follow me as an adult who has moved almost every single year for the last 15 years. From homelessness to diplomatic life, forces have moved me around so frequently that I stopped putting up photos in the places I lived.

Now, as I lay on a bed that I hope to be mine for the next 10 years (because I think I’ll need a new bed after a while), I’m excited to put up a few pictures. I want to put up pictures of friends coming over, my boys growing up, my husband and I celebrating more anniversaries, and even some takes of me doing the work I love as a journalist.

Glad to be back! Glad to be home.

At a time when there are so many dark stories in the headlines, I hope this one offers you a little levity.

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Order a signed copy of my sci-fi novel The Herd- When Democracy Falls.

And remember,…

I am one summer break until mid-September. (Truthfully, I am moving and it’s a lot of work.) So I am bringing back some oldies but goodies you may have missed. First published August 2024.

James Baldwin has to be one of the most interesting public thinkers in history. He was the original “woke” figure when the word still meant enlightened. His words in the United States and overseas forced people to think deeply about the founding, beauty, and complications of our country. On his 100th birthday, we should reflect on one of his more controversial ideas that we still debate today—that we all built America.

“I am not a ward of America. I am not an object of missionary charity. I am one of the people who built the country. Until this [is accepted] there is scarcely any hope for the American dream,” Baldwin concluded during a 1965 debate against William F. Buckley, founder of the conservative National Review in the UK. Baldwin won the debate.

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His rhetoric was bold and still is. His words, noting that Black and other minorities are not simply people who have taken from the state but people who have helped build it, remain controversial, though a matter of historical record as he notes.

Other authors like Nikole Hannah-Jones have come under scrutiny and had their books banned for echoing similar ideas.

Why does this idea ruffle people’s feathers?

Particularly today, there seems to be a notion that Black people are unjustly taking from the country without earning what they have received. Following the Supreme Court striking down affirmative action and the anti-DEI movement, this concept is perpetuated. We see it in references to elected officials, journalists, CEOs, and the like as “DEI” which once meant diversity, equity, and inclusion, now insinuating they didn’t earn their spots. I’ve had friends in various positions say they were attacked online with terms like “DEI.”

But Baldwin challenges this perpetuating idea that Black Americans must constantly prove themselves to belong.

“From a very literal point of view, the harbors and the ports, and the railroads of the country, the economy, especially of the southern states, could not conceivably be what it has become if they had not had… cheap labor,” says Baldwin during that debate, referencing the slaves who built the country “under someone else’s whip… for nothing.”

So what if people learn and internalize that Black and other minorities in the country have earned their spaces and have contributed to the building of this country?

This is something that theorists like W.E.B. Du Bois and Baldwin point out as important in their writings and speeches. They argue that it is crucial to see Black contributions to society—not just for making peanut butter like we often do during Black History Month, but as Baldwin notes, for the railroads or, as Hannah-Jones points out, for the realization of civil rights in the country.

Once you start from a place of believing that a minority person with a high position did something to earn it, and people see each other and their ancestors as equal contributors to the country, equally hardworking, the manner of discourse on so many issues could change.

Therefore, it goes without question that Baldwin’s thoughts are as relevant today as they were in 1965. The debate, though morphed in some ways, still rages on.

“If one has got to prove one's title to the land, isn’t 400 years enough?” asks Baldwin. “400 years, at least 3 wars, the American soil is full of the corpses of my ancestors.”

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Has having kids suddenly become political?

Does anyone else think it’s... odd... that this election season the rhetoric has divided Americans between those of us who have children and those who don’t? Like many things this election cycle, I did not see that one coming.

I know a lot of people—people who aspire and don’t aspire to be parents—and none of those decisions are political. For many people I know, having children is a deeply personal, apolitical decision. For some, the choice is out of their hands; they may want kids but can’t have them or have lost them.

But I have lived in countries where bearing children is a political act for some party members. In Turkey, for example, in 2009, then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called on families to bear three children each as a way of securing the strength of the nation.

“Strong families lead to strong nations,” Erdoğan was quoted saying.

In Spain, political leaders have passed policies to encourage people to bear children, an effort to hedge against an aging population. But both of those countries are arguably more accommodating than the U.S. for parents. They have paid leave policies and, in Spain, public playgrounds for children are everywhere.

In America, without paid leave and with soaring childcare costs, having a kid is not always considered an economically sound decision. When I was in the State Department, several foreign service officers with young children refused to take posts in the United States because of the cost of childcare and the availability of affordable quality schools.

With this new line of discussion about parenthood in America, maybe more discussions will follow about ways to relieve parents from the burdens of having children.

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What I Am Reading: Sapiens

I recently picked up the book "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari, a book about the evolutionary development of human cognitive abilities. This book is as interesting as it is dry, and yes, both things can be true. But one part of the book stuck out to me: the lack of understanding about the persistence of gender inequality throughout human societies throughout time.

It’s wild because throughout the novel the author has interesting explanations for why humans are racist, why Europeans ruled the seas, why monotheistic religions became more influential than polytheistic ones, and so on. But there is no explanation for why no matter what society I was born into almost at any time in human history, if I was a woman, I would most likely be subjected to a lower class.

He then goes on to debunk common theories that people have about why this is, like strength. For example, he points out that great strength simply meant you got put on the front lines and died first, but the people actually running things were often average and smart like Napoleon. It was intelligence and the ability to govern that made leaders in societies, not strength.

But why then do we see this persistent gender inequality everywhere? Don’t women have the capability to be just as intelligent? Frustratingly, he doesn’t have a concrete answer.

This particularly struck me because I recently did a story for NPR that showed how people incarcerated in women’s prisons had less access to educational opportunities than those in men’s prisons. This is important because access to education is said to be the number one way to reduce recidivism. And just by a set of what could be described as flukes, women, even in prison, don’t have equal opportunities.

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I am one summer break until mid-September. (Truthfully, I am moving and it’s a lot of work.) So I am bringing back some oldies but goodies you may have missed. First published March 2025.

This is Chapter 1 of my book, The Herd.

If you missed the other chapters, you can listen to Chapters 2, 3 and 4 right here on this blog. And if you’d like to own the book, you can grab a copy from your favorite retailer via my website.

You can also listen to the audio version of this chapter, just a heads-up, it does include some strong language.

But hey, this dystopia might just feel a little better than the one some of us are living through.

Enjoy the ride.

I slide the story toward the editor and wait for a response. He curses while furiously striking his keyboard.

"Fucking idiot, these fools will believe anything." He doesn't look up or reach for the paper. "Is this what the bots gave you?"

"I—" I pause, unsure if I should tell him the truth. "I made some changes. I had to—"

"Again?" He finally looks at me.

I wipe my sweaty palms against my jeans and calculate my words.

"The numbers were off. I ran it several times on my own. Changes the whole story," I manage to choke out the truth.

The fury from his fingers engulfs his hand like flames as he slams his fist against the desk. His mouse and keypad jump, and the precious coffee others in the outside world would literally kill each other to have spills on the ground.

"Damn it." His eyes dart toward the coffee.

He stands up and trudges towards me. Instinctively, I stumble backwards and graze my hands over the dagger hidden on my waist.

He keeps marching toward me, and I keep backing away until I hit his cold mahogany door. I keep my eyes on him while feeling for the handle, wishing I had left it open. I inhale and exhale with each step he takes.

"You will not tell anyone about this," he says, digging his finger into my shoulder and fogging my glasses with his breath.

"We are working on an update, and there are a few kinks. We don't want anyone to needlessly panic. You understand?"

I nod slowly.

"Very well then." He takes a few steps back, leans against his desk, and lets out a deep breath.

"Thank you again for making the corrections. It's imperative that we have and maintain trust. You are dismissed."

Relieved, I whip around, open the door, and bolt out of the room. But just as I am turning the corner, I catch a glimpse of the stack of papers I left on his desk hanging over the trash bin.

That was three months ago.

***

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My sweaty hands grip the edge of my desk as I sit at my usual workspace, waiting for my name to be called. I close my eyes and try to tune out the noisy beeps and churns of the machines and chatter all around me. I've waited four years for this moment, but somehow I still don't feel ready.

I work as a contractor for one of the largest news networks in the world, the only network on this side of the Atlantic to survive the crash and resist acquisition by either a billionaire or the government. People tell me I'm lucky to be here, that many desire my job, and so I should be happy. And I am happy, or at least I think I am.

I work in the heart of the news station, which buzzes like a factory. There are about ten long tables in parallel rows, each with about ten editors seated next to machines that resemble printers but possess the artificial intelligence of advanced bots. These machines scan the internet, smart devices, and all types of digital outputs for announcements and credible leads for news stories, then assemble the first drafts of stories for the editors to review. The editors review the drafts, make the necessary changes, and upload the articles. But most of the time, they simply upload the drafts since the machines have become so advanced that they hardly need editing. Once the higher-ups in the station approve the stories, they are published, and the editors share them on social media. I sit in the third seat on the first row.

Our seating is a sign of rank. Editors say it can take years to get to the first row, but I did it just after two.

I stare at the paper the bot has spewed out for me to review. It's about the poverty rate throughout the country. According to the raw copy, based on leaked government records, the numbers have remained stable for the last six months. My fingers glide across the bot's screen, requesting the dataset the computer has used. With a quick glance, I notice several errors.

Another one, I think to myself. That's the fourth time this week!

Lately, I've been catching a lot of these mistakes. It started about five months ago when I was bored and picked up one of the rare history books my uncle left me about what used to be the United States economy before the crash. While reading, I noticed a historical detail in the book that directly contradicted something I saw in one of the bot stories I edited and published earlier that day. As I dug deeper into the details and reviewed the story, I found multiple inaccuracies.

Since then, I've gone down rabbit holes with these bot stories, checking and double-checking. Normally, I try to keep a low profile, but there were so many mistakes I decided to alert some senior editors. They supposedly looked into it and told me it’s nothing but an update bug. I don't know if I believe them. Something feels off.

I also have a strange feeling I've been watched more closely since reporting the incident. People know who I am, but for years I've successfully laid low. My father had a reputation for constantly shaking things up, and I saw firsthand what it cost him and my family.

Truth is, there's not much value in shaking things up these days. We need the station. People need something they can trust. I need something I can trust.

My mind returns to the story. It's clear from the data that certain regions have been severely undercounted. I decide to rework the headline and the story. It now reads, "Bogus Numbers Keep the True National Poverty Rate Hidden."

I stare at the bot next to me, wondering if I need to report this uptick in errors again—not just from what the bots spew out but also from what I see published. It worries me that the public might begin to question our credibility. But I also wonder, who am I to bring up such accusations?

"Feonix, Feonix!" A voice jolts me from my thoughts.

I look up to see Emre hovering over my desk. I tense, instinctively wary of his intentions.

"Uhhh, hi," I reply, confused, wondering why after all this time he has decided to make conversation today.

His hazel eyes meet my brown ones as I look up. He's tall and handsome, with a mischievous grin that makes me wonder if he knows something I don't. The way he carries himself, people might assume he thinks he's better than everyone else—present but a bit aloof, as if he has better things to do than this job. I assume he's talking to me because of the competition and nothing more. But as his eyes pierce mine, I almost hold my breath, waiting for his reply. I'm not trying to get caught up in any more station entanglements, but I cannot deny that Emre has swag.

"I know we haven't spoken much," he says slowly, seeming unsure of what to say next, "but I wanted to say good luck tomorrow—not that you need it. You make this look easy."

There's a sincerity in his voice that catches me off guard, as if he genuinely cares about my fate. It makes me want to believe that perhaps not everyone here is part of the facade. Maybe, just maybe, I could afford to let my guard down. But old habits die hard.

"We haven't spoken at all," I snap back at him, immediately regretting the harshness of my words. "And I really don't have the time to start today."

His half-smile fades to a frown, and for a second, I want to kick myself for being a bitch again. I could maybe use a friend, or at least one less enemy in this process. But my instincts remain, and instead of apologizing, I give him a look that says, "Why are you still here?"

His beautiful eyes dim as his pleasant demeanor vanishes. He walks back to his seat in the second row. If my response has dejected him, he doesn’t show it as he quickly resumes his work. I can't help but notice how he nervously taps his fingers on the table, something I've seen him do when he's deep in thought. I wonder what he's thinking about now. Probably that I'm such a bitch.

I shake my head as if to clear it and look back down at my computer. My hands shake, and my face feels flushed. I suddenly thank my lucky stars for the melanin in my skin.

Get it together, I think to myself. What an outsized reaction to a basic greeting.

The bot lights up. My story has been approved. The tension in my body drains away with this realization, then immediately tenses again as I remember what else I have to do. I’ve come to enjoy most of my work, but sharing on social media always gives me anxiety. Some editors are obsessed, arguing with every bot and person online. They thrive on the drama, the relentless back-and-forth exchanges that give them a sense of purpose. And somehow, all the belligerence and hot takes have garnered them large followings. To me, social media interactions have always seemed disingenuous. We all know we put up a facade there. Would they say that shit to my face? I know they wouldn’t.

Up until two years ago, my account looked like a bot's. I followed a few people, like the news director (everyone follows the news director), and only a few people from my neighborhood followed me. But two years ago, I decided I needed to do more to qualify for the Aptitude Test. Now, I have thousands of followers.

There's only one news director position, and for years, they have been looking for a successor. To narrow the choice down fairly, years ago, the station director announced that the person with the highest score on the Aptitude Test, when she either passes the baton because she can no longer work or passes away, will be the successor.

But to even qualify for the test, you must be a Station 7 employee and have at least 300,000 social followers—the concept being that you must be both intelligent and exhibit leadership. Few contractors qualify, and none have passed any part of the test. So I certainly stand out, and I know it.

But today is my last day as an editor because my contract is about to expire, and—in order to fulfill my promise to my uncle—I decide to take the Aptitude Test. I will probably fail. I am not a leader. I don’t even have friends. But I made a promise.

If I pass the test with the highest score, I'll take over this building as the head of the source of information that has given me and others hope for so many years—an improbable scenario.

If I lose, the more likely outcome, I don’t really have a next step planned. There’s not much planning that can be done with life outside of the station, only trying to survive.

After all I've done, I have never been offered a full-time role. I guess I’m not perky or likable enough. I applied so many times but am always told they feel a different candidate is a better fit. Maybe it’s all my complaints about the bots. Either way, my time as an editor expires because my contract will be up, and I'll have nowhere to go.

I've known for a while that my time was ticking, so two years ago, I amped up my social strategy to qualify. Station 7 employees often get more followers than most people because of the organization’s reputation. Two years ago, I had 6,804 followers. But when I started taking the work more seriously—spotting mistakes the bots made, staying up late to take on challenging stories, and not only sharing my stories but also the process behind them—my following exploded. Now I have about 450,000 people following every post I make, giving me many more followers than I need to qualify.

"This will be one of my last story explanations," I begin typing my next post to my followers.

"I've entered the contest. I will start the Aptitude Test tomorrow," I continue.

"If I win, I hope I can be half the leader Director Revel is, consistently upholding the truth. Thank you all for your support. I hope you will continue to follow and support me."

I hesitate for a minute, reading the message about three times. Then I hit send.

Immediately, my screen lights up with notifications, and my following grows by the thousands. Every time someone enters the Aptitude Test, they gain thousands of followers. Though the details of the test are secret, people update their followers as they pass certain parts, and followers root for contestants like sports teams.

I wonder who these followers are. I wonder how many of them root for me to succeed. Then I consider how many of them want me to fail.

I close the screen and take a deep breath. I try to hide my anxiety, which has built to mountainous proportions by this time. It’s coming from not only from the fact that I am taking the test but also because I waited until the last minute to do it.

I close my eyes.

"Idiot, you are an idiot," my father's words echo in my ear.

"Where will you go when you fail?" I imagine him questioning me. "Once you lose, you'll be thrown to the wolves. Chicken shit. You have a month, then you'll be back in the streets with the rest of the trash where you belong."

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I hope you found this newsletter helpful and engaging. Please share with any friends or family you think would be interested and feel free to buy me a coffee by subscribing if you got some use out of it or make a one-time donation.

Follow me on Instagram too!

And here is my LinkedIn.

Order a signed copy of my sci-fi novel The Herd- When Democracy Falls.

And remember,…

I am one summer break until mid-September. (Truthfully, I am moving and it’s a lot of work.) So I am bringing back some oldies but goodies you may have missed. First published March 2024.

Apart from tapas, Barcelona has apparently given the world another export: Aitana Lopez, an AI influencing fitness guru. Think impossibly smooth skin, perfectly flowy pink hair, and proportions that make Disney princesses look downright average. I remember staring at her photo, mesmerized, reminded of the stomach pouch I carry after giving birth to two children. At first, I assumed these were your standard “overly filtered” social media personalities—just more curated than usual. But as I kept scrolling, I realized there was no human underneath the face-tuning apps. These influencers weren’t real people at all.

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That realization left me half-fascinated, half-freaked out. I’d been one of those folks who constantly rolled my eyes at influencers for being “fake.” Now, here I was, gawking at every pixel of something literally not human—yet with hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of followers. After all the flak we give human influencers for lacking authenticity, how on earth did a completely fabricated personality rise to stardom? Does our need for a flawless idol trump the requirement that it be a breathing person? I wanted answers, and I found them in a chat with a digital anthropologist who pointed out, in the most Canadian-and-British-friendly way, that this phenomenon is just a high-tech spin on something ancient.

AI influencers are surging across social platforms, offering a brand-safe, always-on persona that never sleeps or scandalizes. It seems contradictory, but according to experts, resonates with a historical human tendency to create icons—totems—that embody shared values. What we’re witnessing is the collision of that ancient behavior with cutting-edge tech, opening up a new sphere for brands, marketers, and communities worldwide.

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An Evolution in Human Idol Worship

Just regular humans Giles Crouch and I having a conversation on AI influencers and totemism for JAMCQ. I have about 3k followers on X, Giles has about 4.5K on LinkedIn, so AI has us both beat.

It’s not like worshipping celebrities is new. We’ve been doing this for thousands of years—building statues, wearing masks, creating figures to rally around or pray to when life got unpredictable. Giles put a name to it: totemism, this old-as-dirt practice of giving an object or idea (like a carved figure or a killer pop album) enough power that entire communities unite around it. If you’ve ever yelled “Slay!” at a Beyoncé concert, you’ve already joined that club. I’m a card-carrying member of the BeyHive myself, so I totally get the urge to gather en masse around a single iconic figure. When it works, it feels like belonging, but it also feels a little primal—like you’d do out-of-character things in the hive.

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Now, imagine transferring that same raw devotion to a digital entity that can’t ever slip up or randomly decide it wants to grow old and retire. AI influencers basically take this centuries-old totem thing and supercharge it. They talk back to us, post flawless content 24/7, and never reveal any awkward details about their personal lives—because they don’t have one.

“Totemism on Instagram is aesthetic, so design means a lot,” explains Giles, noting how the idols are created in each platform. “In TikTok, well, it's more performative totemism. An AI influencer encourages people to sing and dance along, so it's more of an active thing. Twitter or X, that's more what I call conversational totem, totemism. It's more about dialogue. Then there’s YouTube. There it is narrative totemism because they're longer videos. There can be some engagement but not really. It’s the AI influencer creating the narrative, and it's less so about the community.”

Totemism makes total sense: people want icons to believe in, to dress like, to defend in online wars. We used to carve them in stone; now we code them to perfection. And the most mind-blowing part? We’re still showing up with the same fervor, if not more.

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Syphoning Marketing Dollars Off to AI

Reports project the influencer marketing industry to be valued at a whooping $24 billion and growing. When you add AI influencers into the mix, the possibilities seem boundless. So how are brands tapping into this totemism?

“People like to relate to brands, but they don't have relationships with them,” says Giles. But AI influencers are changing that.

They allow brands to embody human-like figures, totems, to build direct bonds with consumers.

“What’s interesting is that it’s not so much the influencer that we’re forming a relationship with—it’s the community we create around that influencer,” Giles Crouch explained.

And for many companies, the holy grail is fostering a sense of community— profitable communities.

Giles points to companies like Puma, a German athletic shoe brand. Puma introduced an AI-created influencer with a specific cultural background—an avatar from Morocco—tailored to resonate with sports fans across African and Middle Eastern markets. Why Morocco? Because Puma saw a significant following in these regions and wanted a “spokesperson” who could speak directly to those cultural values and lifestyle aspirations.

And what ends up happening doesn’t stop at official brand campaigns. Communities form organically around these digital figures. People create fan art, build subreddits, launch hashtags, and even craft virtual “meet-and-greet” sessions. While some brand managers fear AI might depersonalize relationships, early adopters find that the opposite is happening. It’s the fan community where the real brand equity builds, providing a sense of belonging that extends well beyond the product itself.

In practical terms, AI influencers can:

• Post and engage with audiences 24/7, crossing time zones effortlessly.

• Speak multiple languages or vernaculars, broadening brand reach in global markets.

• Provide consistent messaging aligned with brand values.

• Continuously learn from user interactions, refining their approach to generate deeper engagement.

The lure is clear: a flexible, data-driven persona that can be “enhanced” with a few tweaks in programming. That can be a game-changer for companies looking to scale quickly without risking the next big scandal or falling victim to influencer burnout.

Not All Is Pleasant in Pleasantville.

Beyond the fandom, there are ethical and social concerns, and different cultures are seeing unique challenges. In South Korea’s K-pop scene, fans expect a certain level of innocence and purity. But does an AI influencer take that a step further, reinforcing unrealistic expectations about perfection, body image, or lifestyle? In the West, digital anthropologists worry about manipulated consumerism—an AI figure that entices you to spend more, buy more, or behave in ways you might not otherwise. Meanwhile, data centers powering these AI “personalities” guzzle electricity, leaving questions about sustainability and long-term scalability.

Then there’s the emotional bond. If an AI influencer is perceived as a friend, a role model, or even a romantic figure (because humans have a knack for projection), how do we handle the psychological fallout if it “ghosts” followers or the brand pulls the plug?

“We have to ask ourselves what it means to be human in a phygital world,” Giles said, referencing that blurred line between our physical and digital realities. “If an AI influencer, all of a sudden gets turned off, and people— hundreds, thousands, millions— have formed a relationship with this AI influencer, then it's gone. Do we get depressed? Do we have a funeral? What are the rituals that we place around that?”

We don’t have the guardrails in place to deal with not just a psychological fallout—the risks of suicide, depression, and anxiety. We also don't have the guardrails to deal with cyber crime and how we can be manipulated by these AIs. And that is a real risk for society.

So How Can a Business Use an AI Influencer Effectively?

• Start with an Exit Strategy: If you ever retire the AI persona, think about how fans might react. Giles cautions that if people build emotional attachments, shutting the influencer down cold turkey can leave them feeling abandoned—much like a show abruptly canceled without a finale. That can sour your brand’s reputation, or worse cause psychological damage to people so tread carefully.

• Explore Cultural “Type” First: Giles points out that cultures fall loosely into “type one” (highly individualistic) or “type two” (collectivist). In the West (type one), personal freedoms and liberties come first, so your AI influencer should highlight uniqueness and personal gain. In places like South Korea or many Nordic nations (type two), a “we-first” approach resonates better—emphasizing teamwork, community values, and shared identity.

• Respect Local Norms and Expectations: If you’re launching an AI influencer in a region where fans expect a squeaky-clean public image (like K-pop circles), perhaps understanding and navigating that cultural reality will make it easier for the public to accept and feel safe with your technological human. Conversely, in Western markets, showing a bit of “edginess” might actually drive more engagement, as fans enjoy personalities that stand out.

• Customize Communication Channels: Different areas have preferred platforms—WhatsApp or Twitter in one region, KakaoTalk in South Korea, Telegram in parts of Eastern Europe. Tailor your AI influencer’s main channel to the local audience’s habits, make sure it speaks the local language and strategize your totemic behaviors based on the platform.

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The Analysis 

I’ll admit, by the time I finished my research, I was both intrigued and tempted to delete every social app on my phone. There’s no denying the marketing goldmine these digital darlings seem to represent. But the speed at which this is all going, the threats to jobs, energy and society are just as poignant as the business opportunities. 

Giles pointed out that in the past humans had many decades to adopt and adapt to technology. Today, that’s all out the window. 

But take a moment and digest it all. I had to. Just know that the moment you need to take can also leave you feeling a bit further behind. 

The Cultural Takeaway

You’re more cultured now because you see that AI influencers thrive not just on flashy tech, but on deep-rooted cultural values. In South Korea’s communal context, they satisfy collective ideals. In Western individualistic cultures, they offer curated authenticity without the risk. They’re modern totems, reflecting the timeless human need for shared stories—only now, our icons can text us back. 

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When I left the State Department, I said the book I would write out of that experience would be called Gaslit Girl. Because I had never endured an episode where I was so forcefully made to question truths I experienced.

But today that concept seems to be everywhere. The other day, I heard an NPR reporter in Israel acknowledge to host Steve Inskeep that a report they were currently discussing and witnessing was under dispute.

“We stand by our reporting,” she had to affirm, for herself and the network.

As a country, we are learning the hard way how to navigate the experience of being gaslit. Americans have been forcing ourselves to engage in debate but are now learning where to draw the line—refusing to argue about water being wet or the sky being blue.

And this is particularly difficult in the world of journalism, law, government, or any space where you need some sort of shared reality to host broad public thought. Inevitably, when the country is as divided as it is and reality becomes more malleable, not everyone can come along for your ride.

The Collective Destruction of Gaslighting

Because the word “gaslight” doesn’t feel as heavy, people tend to underestimate its impacts on individuals and collective societies.

But researchers have documented the profound harm to individuals, making them doubt themselves, fall into depression, and at worst contemplate self-harm. When done to entire societies, it proves just as destructive.

Dutch researcher Natascha Rietdijk has drawn the connection between post-truth politics and collective gaslighting, showing how political figures use three devastating strategies: introducing counternarratives to confuse, discrediting critics to isolate, and denying plain facts to disorient. These tactics both spread false beliefs and systematically erode our trust in our own capacity to distinguish truth from fiction. I feel it personally, as some days I find myself repeatedly fact-checking the same line of a story.

And history bears witness to this destruction. One of the most infamous cases is Stalin’s regime. Historians, such as Anne Applebaum, note that Stalin didn’t just lie to people, his regime created an environment where citizens could no longer trust their own perceptions. And even those who did trust their own judgement, suppressed it out of fear for a “knock on the door.”

But Black Americans will tell you we don’t need to go all the way to Russia to find our historical case studies on this. For generations, gaslighting convinced entire communities to doubt what they witnessed with their own eyes—violence dismissed as imagination, injustice reframed as personal failing.

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Using Fiction to Finish the Book

When I first wrote my book proposal for Gaslit Girl, it was meant to be nonfiction, and I had no idea how I was going to make the structure of the narrative work. It wasn't until I embraced fiction as a tool of description that I made it to 81,000 words.

Similar to how Octavia Butler used science fiction to describe complex experiences that Black women carry—such as extreme empathy, a kryptonite that makes us vulnerable to a savage society—I found it easier to explore the detrimental and complex internal battle that comes with gaslighting through fiction. Which I'm excited to eventually release as book two in my science fiction trilogy The Herd.

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You Are Well

But I say all this to say, you are not crazy. You have seen what you have seen and heard what you have heard. The sky is blue and water is wet.

As both a former diplomat and current journalist, I am intimately acquainted with the concept of being gaslit and fighting to make sure truth is set free. These days we may need to remind ourselves to keep our feet on the ground more than we did in the past.

The truth doesn’t change just because someone with power—whether that's your boss or a politician—says it does. Your reality doesn’t become less real because someone refuses to acknowledge it.

Sure, in some cases you may need to have your perspective broadened. But at other times, you may need the reminder that the ground is still solid beneath your feet.

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It had been a while since a political figure had yelled at me, so I was genuinely taken aback when, one month into my new job, my phone rang with fury on the other end. But here’s the thing about the news business, this is par for the course. Every time you hit publish, you brace for impact.

And I get it. People want answers. Why did you choose that angle? Why only interview three people instead of ten? Why didn’t you include this crucial detail I think you missed? These aren’t unreasonable questions. In fact, they’re exactly the questions I want to address today, because there’s real logic to how stories come together. It’s not the shadowy conspiracy some imagine—it’s something far more human and constrained.

The Sacred Trinity of Storytelling

First: Know Your People

Every newsroom has its tribe. The Wall Street Journal speaks to the deal-makers and market-watchers. Politico feeds the political junkies their daily fix of insider baseball. Slate serves up smart takes for urban millennials sipping their second oat milk latte. Understanding your audience isn’t just strategy—it’s everything. It’s your North Star, your compass, your reason for being. (This is something I have written about before.)

The way you frame a story, the voices you choose to amplify, even the platforms where you share your work, all of it flows from this fundamental question: Who are you serving, and what do they need to know?

Second: The Brutal Mathematics of Space and Time

Here’s the reality that keeps me up at night: The average web story gets 700-1200 words to shed light on a complicated issue. A radio feature—even a "long" one—gets four minutes to tell a story that might span decades.

Four. Minutes.

I’ve become a master synthesizer by necessity, distilling 60 pages of notes into three pages of story. Hours of raw, emotional interviews compressed into four minutes of radio that somehow still captures the human heart of it all. The cutting is painful. Every quote left on the floor feels like a small betrayal. But this is the art, finding the essential truth in the avalanche of information.

Third: The Cold Equations of Resources and Impact

Newsrooms today are leaner, hungrier, more selective than ever. I cover Montgomery County, Prince George’s County, and Maryland state government for WAMU. That’s roughly two million people across hundreds of potential stories every single day. This is not Pokemon, we can’t catch them all.

So we choose. How many people will this story impact? For how long? Will it change how you live your daily life? These aren’t perfect metrics, but they’re honest ones. We’re trying to ensure the most important stories don’t slip through the cracks for the people counting on us.

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A Great Time to Be Back

When you understand these constraints, you begin to grasp what a big deal it is every time a news organization chooses to publish a story, especially the hard ones. Especially the ones that make powerful people reach for their phones in anger.

The real, visceral fear that comes with accountability journalism. The knowledge that somewhere, someone is about to get very, very upset with you.

And when I think about the pressure newsrooms are under right now, when I consider the stories that have emerged just this month—coverage of the Epstein files, immigrants imprisoned in El Salvador, local elections that will reshape communities, starvation in Gaza—I think about the people brave enough to hit publish anyway. Knowing they might get sued. Knowing they'll be berated. Knowing that readers will always want more context, more voices, more everything than space and time allow.

I am proud of them. Proud of the work. Proud of the bravery. Proud of them meeting this moment when meeting the moment has never been harder.

Media is far from perfect. We make mistakes. We miss things. We're human, and our humanity shows in our work. But damn, there are some people out there doing extraordinary work under extraordinary pressure.

One month back in, and I'm reminded why this matters. Why every story matters. Why every angry phone call, every difficult conversation, every late night spent getting the details right—it all adds up to something larger than ourselves.

I'm glad to be back.

Check out my dance for the real ones.

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I recently went to a paint and sip night in my neighbor’s apartment, one of those spontaneous gatherings that somehow becomes more meaningful than you expect. We sat there with our brushes and canvases, and it was amazing that the chaos that riddled our conversation didn’t match the beauty of the art we created.

Here were women from completely different industries—media, tech, food security—and yet we all shared the same unsettling feeling: the ground beneath our feet won't stop shifting.

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Cyborgs In Need of Constant Updates

We talked about what I've started thinking of as our “cyborg existence”—the way we're simultaneously living in two interconnected but distinct systems that are both experiencing unprecedented turbulence.

The Physical Plane: This is the tangible world. The one we should feel more secure in but climate change seems to be manifesting as constant flooding, unpredictable weather patterns, and a sense that even our physical environment has become unreliable.

The Digital Plane: This is where we spend increasing portions of our lives, where the cryptocurrencies seek to circumvent traditional systems, WEB 3 promises decentralization of power, and humans compete with AI for influence.

It is this dual existence in two planes that makes us cyborgs, unfortunately, the consistent shifts of both worlds mean we are constantly in need updates. At least that’s how it feels sometimes.

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The Exhaustion of Constant Adaptation

What struck me most about our conversation was how similar our experiences felt across such different fields. Whether you’re in media barely keeping up with the content game and watching platforms change algorithms left and right, in tech seeing entire industries disrupted by AI and startup chaos, or in any other field, there's this shared sense of running just to stay in place. We're all trying to reach for something that feels perpetually just out of grasp.

The mental load of navigating this dual complexity is enormous. Our brains are constantly processing change on multiple levels—economic, technological, environmental, social. It’s like being asked to run on two treadmills simultaneously, each moving at different speeds, both accelerating unpredictably.

Jumping off The Treadmill

The paint night, we did what we all have to do sometimes. We stopped. We let the world keep spinning. We “touched grass” —a phrase one of the tech women used, half-jokingly, about her colleagues who rarely venture offline.

We didn’t solve anything that night, but we did find a collective understanding. In times when everything feels uncertain, the path forward might be deliberately small and incremental. One foot in front of the other. Day by day. Not because we lack ambition, but because this kind of intentional pacing might be the most sustainable way to navigate complexity.

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I hope you found this newsletter helpful and engaging. Please share with any friends or family you think would be interested and feel free to buy me a coffee by subscribing if you got some use out of it or make a one-time donation.

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And here is my LinkedIn.

Order a signed copy of my sci-fi novel The Herd- When Democracy Falls.

And remember,…

This is Chapter 4 of my book, The Herd.

If you missed the earlier chapters, you can catch up on Chapters 1, 2, and 3 right here on this blog. And if you’d like to own the book, you can grab a copy from your favorite retailer via my website.

You can also listen to the audio version of this chapter, just a heads-up, it does include some strong language.

But hey, this dystopia might just feel a little better than the one some of us are living through.

Enjoy the ride.

I had a flashback to the moment when I woke up in a hospital bed after my family was burned alive. But this time, I know I’m not in a hospital bed.

“We need to get to a hospital,” says the male voice holding up my body.

Pain throbs through my body as if someone took a hammer and smashed my muscles. Half of my body is held up by the stranger, while my legs still feel the cold ground beneath them.

I try to speak, but all I can let out is a groan.

“Relax.” I realize the voice is familiar, but I can't lift my head to see who it is. “I am going to get you out of here.”

Then everything goes black again.

***

The next time I wake up, I’m in a bed, but it isn’t a hospital.

I look at my hands—no more blood. I’m wearing a shirt I don’t recognize. Footsteps approach, and my heart races, fearful of who’s coming.

“I’m glad you’re awake,” says Emre. I look up to see him speaking to me. “We don’t have much time. A day has already gone by. How are you feeling?”

“Where am I?” I ask, feeling a bit disoriented by his familiar face.

“This is my apartment. I brought you back here after finding your body on the ground outside of Riverside Academy. The cab driver...” He pauses. “He didn’t make it.”

“How did you know I was at the school?” I ask.

“I didn’t. I guess we must have been chasing the same tip,” he replies.

Then I remember Michelle Robinson at the massage parlor and the principal I was supposed to meet. I need to get back to the station to show my team what I have.

“Where is my bag? I need to get going.” It takes all my strength to raise my body and turn my head to look around the room.

“I didn’t see a bag,” Emre replies. “Actually, I was going to take you to the hospital when I realized that what may have happened was no accident.”

My body shudders as I remember the sound of multiple gunshots, the wet sprinkle of blood and brains all over me, and the crash. But I have no idea who tried to kill me. Did Michelle call someone to tell them to kill me? Did they trace me through the photo online? Who took my things? Did I fall into a trap?

“No, it was no accident,” I say softly.

“Look.” Emre sits on the edge of the bed and gently raises my head so our eyes are interlocked. His hazel eyes seem to pierce through mine. “I’ve been watching you, and it’s no secret that you’re smart. I can help you, but you have to help me too. I think if we put what we have together, we can create a story for the station.”

“And I can help you through the next two parts of this exam,” he continues. “I’ve taken this test twice before, and I know what it takes to get through it.”

“Why should I trust you?” I narrow my eyes at him and move his hand away from my face. “You’re not on my team, and in the end, only one of us will be chosen.”

“So why not make it one of us? I saved your life, didn’t I?” Emre replies, shifting to the rickety chair beside the bed. “Plus, I can tell you from experience that it’s almost impossible to get through this on your own. And I don’t want to point out the obvious, but right now you need me more than I need you.”

“If I’m so useless, then why do you need me? Why trust me?” I snap back.

“‘Need’ is the wrong word,” Emre replies calmly. “I don’t need you. But I do trust you. I’ve been watching you for a while, and you’re different from the other... drones at the station.”

“Drones?” I repeat quizzically.

“Yes, drones. Those who move, breathe, and live for Station 7,” Emre’s tone turns dark. “It may not be official, but Station 7 is the largest, most powerful faction there is. They make or break faction leaders, can drive the public to revolt, and do a bunch of other crazy shit.”

“You’re talking crazy.” I shake my head at him.

“And most people working in Station 7 worship it, assuming they’re doing God’s work or something,” he continues.

“And you don’t?” I interrupt. “Think you’re doing good work, I mean?”

“We live in a time where ‘good’ is arbitrary,” Emre replies. “If ‘good’ means helping one of the most powerful entities in the city consolidate power and influence over the people, then sure. We’re doing good work.”

“What do you mean?” I reply. He really sounds crazy to me.

“Look, I enjoy the work Station 7 does just as much as the next guy. If there are faction leaders taking money from foreign governments to deceive the public, then we should expose those fuckers,” he says. “But you need to pay attention to the patterns. I guess it would be hard for someone who’s only a contractor to see...”

“Excuse me?” I give him a sharp look. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“You’re right. I’m sorry,” he says.

Emre explains that Station 7 has friends and enemies. The stories station leadership chooses to pursue—and the ones they don’t—are not by accident. By breaking up faith in faction leaders, the station builds faith in itself. If we check the history, many of the big investigative stories we produced on leadership were about people who lobbied against the station or ideas the station leadership opposed.

He believes that though many of the station leaders began as journalists with strictly editorial missions, that changed some time ago. Now, many of them take on the role of reformers. They’re no longer satisfied with just telling what is; they want to shape what could be.

“You know why I want to be the news director?” Emre’s eyes lock onto mine intensely. A smile—or a smirk—creeps onto his face. His broad shoulders hunch over me in the bed. “Because that’s the only way I can make this story public. It’s time someone checked the largest power in the country.”

My mind races. I’m scared and want to shrink. For years, I’ve worked with an idea of what I thought was the truth. It centered me. It gave me purpose. I don’t want to throw a monkey wrench into that vision.

“Y-you’re a liar,” I yell, hating that my voice stammers. “How do you think you know all this?”

Emre gets up and pulls a projector and a laptop out of the closet. He connects both devices with a black cord and plugs in the projector. The computer’s interface becomes visible against the white wall, shown through the light emanating from the projector.

“I’ve been following this for almost two years now,” he says. “Remember Brian Reynolds?”

Emre pulls up his picture on the screen.

“The former Opes faction policy advisor?” I ask.

“Yes,” Emre replies. “As you know, Opes believes in trying to achieve pure capitalism—almost anarchy of sorts. So when Station 7 reported that Reynolds was giving contracts to family members, he was forced to resign. Great story, right?”

“Respectable,” I reply.

“Well, what people didn’t know was that Station 7 employees—those going through tests like us—found several members of Opes leadership doing the same thing Reynolds did. Fortunately for them, they voted in favor of legislation to increase the information war budget,” he continues.

Emre scrolls through documents on the screen like he’s giving a million-dollar presentation at a company meeting. Each document tracks how different leaders who favored changes like increases to the information war budget, food and resource supply pipelines that included the station, and maintaining media and internet connections that didn’t censor the station received favorable coverage. Meanwhile, others were brought down by one scandal or another.

Additionally, he shows documents proving that many who weren’t brought down by scandals engaged in similar or worse crimes that were never revealed.

“I tracked this most closely during the last test I took,” Emre says, pulling up another document onto the screen. “One of our teammates found multiple faction leaders in the Patriots plotting to attack Latus, the liberals, for their goods like they did nine years ago. Latus isn’t as strong as it was before, but they’ve been trying to rebuild their faction.”

When Emre says this, I feel my heart stop. I don’t want him to continue.

“But this time, the Patriots want to wipe Latus out,” he says, his eyes blazing with an intensity I’ve never seen before. “A girl named Lynn got hold of the plans and shared them with me before she turned them in for a story. Only the money laundering portion of the documents was published, taking down two faction leaders. There were at least ten involved! The story was much larger, and they knew it! Lynn never got the other parts of the Aptitude test, and later, she disappeared!”

Eight other Patriot leaders planned to attack my old faction again—and they got away with it? They never found the girl? My mind races.

“What do you mean she disappeared?” I ask, desperate for an answer.

“Exactly that,” Emre says, his eyes dropping to the floor. “I hadn’t seen or heard from her since the test. It’s impossible to understand how someone could just disappear like that. Maybe she left for her own good, or maybe something worse happened. The truth is, I don’t know.”

“What do you get from exposing all of this?” I ask. “You could be the next one to disappear—or me! No one cares about two people disappearing in a world like this! Why are you doing all of this?”

Emre is silent for a moment. I can almost feel the tension in the air between us.

“Right now, you’re freaked out because you’re beginning to realize you’ve been living a lie,” he says. “I’ve known that feeling for four years now. Two years ago, I decided I couldn’t live like that anymore. Ignorance is fucking bliss, but I don’t have that luxury anymore. The truth taunts me to do the right thing, Feonix.”

“That’s all fine and noble until you’re dead,” I reply with a sneer.

“But Feonix, what exactly are you living for anyway?” he asks, looking straight at me.

There’s silence, as if I could answer such a question. I think of my family, my promise to my uncle, and my need to learn if there was anything else behind my family’s murder. I’m fulfilling promises. But do I even know what I’m getting myself into? I have no one. A sick feeling creeps up inside me. The mystery—what was my dad working on? What did he know? Was he one of the leaders seeking to stand up to the station? Could the station somehow be connected to my family’s death?

Without faith in Station 7’s work, I feel like I have no purpose. I want tears to come to my eyes, but the emptiness I feel in this moment is a pain I know tears won’t relieve. My mind teeters on the edge of consciousness, where some people choose death, and others choose madness. Right now, I don’t know how those who reach that edge bring themselves back to stability again.

“Emre, I cannot do this,” I say, dropping my head into my hands in shame. “This mission seems like something worth pursuing, but I’m not the right person for it.”

“Look, I know it’s a lot to take in right now, but I want you to think about it,” he says, brushing my hair out of my eyes. “When I look into your eyes, I see a determination I don’t see in others. I don’t know what drives you, but you operate with direction and purpose. You move like something greater than just the station’s goals drives you.”

“And here I was thinking your looks meant something totally different,” I say, smirking up at him, trying to pull myself out of the hole I’ve sunken into.

“Trust me, this wasn’t exactly the first scenario I imagined us in—with you in my bed, I mean,” he says, smiling back at me and starting to gather his things.

I narrow my eyes at him and lose the smirk.

“Hey, it’s not my fault that the perfect person for this mission also happens to be the most beautiful,” he says, not looking at me as he puts the projector back into the closet.

I don’t know how to respond. How did we go from talking about a mission that could kill us both to flirting like this?

Then he starts toward the door.

“Emre, where are you going?” I yell after him.

“To sleep. We have to get back to the station first thing in the morning if either of us wants a chance at winning,” he replies from the hallway.

“You don’t have to do that,” I yell back.

“Don’t have to do what?” he replies.

“Sleep,” I say hesitantly, “on the couch.”

What am I doing? I think. I can’t believe I just invited him to share a bed with me. But the memory of my family’s loss, and maybe my purpose, leaves me feeling so empty and alone. I’m not sure I believe or even care about Emre’s mission, but I don’t want to be alone at this moment. And I know he doesn’t either.

“There’s only one bed,” he says, poking his head through the doorway, confirming he understands what I’m suggesting.

“I know,” I offer him a weak smile and attempt to make space for him beside me.

I can see him studying me.

“Look, I’m not suggesting...” I pause. “I’m not suggesting anything will happen. Just, I don’t want to be alone.”

My own admission of vulnerability surprises me. But it’s true. I’ve spent so much of my life alone. I miss trusting people. I miss hugs.

He steps into the room with a smirk on his face. I smile back. He dives into the sheets next to me and starts laughing.

“Hey!” I yell. “Don’t break the bed! This is the only one you have!”

I hit him with a pillow and chuckle. It almost doesn’t sound like me. I haven’t laughed in so long. He turns around and leans over me in the bed.

“Maybe I was wrong about one thing, Feonix,” he says, scanning my eyes. His face is so close to mine, I can feel the warmth of his breath on my lips. I see my chest moving up and down as the intensity of our breathing increases.

“I’m scared,” he continues. “Because I don’t think I can do this mission on my own. I said I didn’t need you, that ‘need’ was the wrong word, but I was wrong. I do need you.”

My body shudders at the thought of the mission again. Somehow, in the course of this day, I’ve gone from needing no one—living independently for years—to needing him too. And with my motivation for living mostly destroyed in a matter of hours, I know I need him and this mission to pull myself away from the edge of insanity. But I still can’t bring myself to say it.

I look back into his eyes towering over mine.

At that, Emre leans in, and I kiss his lips. He kisses me back. Then I pull myself out from under him. Emre hesitates, not sure what to do at that moment.

“Good night, Emre,” I say, turning away from him.

“Uhhh... good night,” he replies, slowly turning the other way.

I can still feel the warmth of his back against mine. That’s what I need. I listen carefully as the pace of our breathing slows down.

I’m sure I wouldn’t have been the first Station 7 worker he’s slept with if I had gone through with it, just like he wouldn’t have been my first. Something about station workers living and working side by side every day seems to breed an environment where casual intercourse is normal. But being with Emre feels different. There’s nothing casual about how desperate we both feel at this moment, and I pray I’ve made the right decision.

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Order a signed copy of my sci-fi novel The Herd- When Democracy Falls.

And remember,…

This Fourth of July, I watched Americans, including an international pop icon, wrestle with their sense of patriotism.

I went to Beyoncé's concert for the music but found myself more struck by the symbolism.

Words filled the screen: “I am an American poet.” Emphasis on “American.”

Then images of Black artists appeared.

The words continued: “With American images like...” followed by a sign for an old Tina Turner concert and James Brown dropping to the ground with his microphone.

What I witnessed was something complicated struggling for expression—a need to affirm the Americanness of Black and other minority populations within this country. It felt like laying stake to a claim, similar to how Beyoncé approached country music, a genre she was repeatedly told she didn't belong in but made space in, not only for herself but for other Black artists.

In that performance, with all the beautiful red, white, and blue outfits, I saw a woman struggling to celebrate when things felt complicated. Her final act made the critique clear: the Statue of Liberty masked with braids.

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It’s Not Just About Queen B

But Beyoncé isn't alone in this wrestling match. According to a recent Gallup poll, this is a national phenomenon. A record low of 58% of Americans say they are "extremely" (41%) or "very" (17%) proud to be American, compared to 87% who said they were extremely or very proud in January 2001. The slip has occurred primarily among Democrats and independents.

While talking to people in the crowd at the concert, I saw a woman wearing a sash that was red, white, and blue but read "America Has a Problem." When I asked her about it, she said this was what she could bring herself to wear that day. I also reached out to people on TikTok and heard from multiple individuals—veterans even—who said their patriotism had been slipping. Though it seemed to be an ongoing struggle, it has certainly hit a new low this year.

Some of the white people who messaged me said their sense of pride slipped was because of the level of racism they see around them that they hadn't witnessed to that extent before. For Black families with military service history, it seemed more complicated—something they wrestled with in an ongoing way, layered with generations of complex relationships with American identity.

This is all worth noting. I've seen Americans domestically and abroad, and we can be an obnoxiously prideful people. So it certainly says something about where we're headed that so many are struggling with their sense of patriotism.

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Lessons From Overseas

While posted as a U.S. diplomat in Saudi Arabia, I was able to write a column in the Arab newspaper there about my feelings on the Fourth of July, a huge feat to discuss freedom and democracy in a strict monarchy. It was short, but I remember it being a challenge. I wanted to celebrate where America was as a country while also addressing the elephant in the room: that I was a Black woman and that our history is fraught, with efforts at cohesion perhaps forever ongoing.

Whether you're domestic or abroad, I’d love to keep this conversation going. How are you feeling? How did you celebrate the Fourth of July? What does patriotism mean to you right now?

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Shout out to The Grade that made a kind donation and republished one my last newsletter! Check them out if you are into education reporting!

I hope you found this newsletter helpful and engaging. Please share with any friends or family you think would be interested and feel free to buy me a coffee by subscribing if you got some use out of it or make a one-time donation.

Follow me on Instagram too!

And here is my LinkedIn.

Order a signed copy of my sci-fi novel The Herd- When Democracy Falls.

And remember,…

This week, I said, “screw it,” and dived fully into video content creation.

For years, I’d been resisting going all-in on video. It felt like a heavy lift, one of those things where you’re either fully committed or you’re wasting your time. Half-measures don’t work in content creation, especially when everything is hypercompetitive and every piece needs to deliver real value to keep people coming back.

But I learned something. My resistance wasn't just about the workload. It was about stepping outside my comfort zone as a professional.

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My Reality Check

I have spent years watching traditional media sink like quicksand as the world revolves around it. Few outlets have had what it takes to find a sustainable way to meet the moment, and because of that, they’ve lost funding, audience and influence.

But what finally pushed me over the edge was this report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which after surveying 100k people said, social media was the number one medium for news consumption for the first time.

I had always been the type of journalist who said I would meet people where they were, so despite all my reservations and online security concerns, I started a TikTok. Yes, I know.

Some journalists, like Aaron Parnas, have built massive followings (he has 4 million followers, including me) by being incredibly fast with breaking news updates. I find myself checking his feed before opening news apps because he’s often ahead of the curve. The pace feels unsustainable to me personally—especially with family constraints—but there's no denying the reality, this is where attention has moved.

I decided to do something more sustainable for me as a mother: a 90 second round up of stories I thought were important, wanted to cover but didn’t have the time to.

And so far the response has been delightful. I received tons of engagement, a good amount of comments and a good amount of followers. And as a reporter, knowing the information you give provides value to the community is everything.

The Career Pivot Framework

This experience taught me something valuable about professional adaptation that applies beyond content creation:

Step 1: Recognize the Resistance

I spent months knowing video was important but finding reasons to avoid it. The “heavy lift” concern was real, but it was also a convenient excuse. When you find yourself repeatedly avoiding something your industry is moving toward, that’s your first signal.

Step 2: Understand the Stakes

The content world doesn’t reward partial commitment. You can’t dabble in video and expect results, audiences can sense half-hearted efforts immediately. This forced me to confront a bigger career question: was I willing to evolve with my field or risk becoming irrelevant?

Step 3: Find Your Sustainable Version

I'm not trying to become Aaron Parnas. I can’t and won’t update every hour on breaking stories. But I can find my own approach to video content that works within my constraints while still meeting the market where it is.

Step 4: Commit Fully (Within Your Parameters)

Once you decide to adapt, commit completely to your version of it. Half-measures waste time and energy while delivering poor results.

What This Means for Your Career

We are living through times where it feels like every industry is shifting, where professionals either adapt to new realities or get left behind. Maybe for you it’s not content creation. Maybe it’s AI tools, remote collaboration platforms, or new client communication styles.

The key is recognizing when your resistance to change may actually be resistance to growth. Sometimes the thing that feels like the biggest lift is exactly what your career needs and maybe also aligns with your values.

The uncomfortable truth is that our professional comfort zones shrink in value over time. What felt like solid ground five years ago might be quicksand today. The question isn’t whether your industry will change, it’s whether you’ll change with it.

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And remember,…

If you’ve followed my work before, you probably know I covered education at WAMU (DC’s local NPR station) and EdSurge. After a winding journey that took me from the newsroom to the State Department (literally around the world and back), I’m thrilled to be back in public radio—this time as the Maryland reporter covering politics and policy.

There’s something deeply meaningful about returning to tell the stories that shape the place where your children are growing up. I get to cover the issues that matter to the families I see at the grocery store, at school pickup, in our neighborhoods—the people who’ve chosen to build their lives here.

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My Receipts

For those who don’t know, I’m the type of reporter who likes stories that make us pause, think, and maybe do something differently. I’ve done—investigations into student seclusion and restraint practices that started local but went national, deep dives into women’s prisons and vulnerable student populations, stories about Chinese international students navigating American universities, stories about schools with high attendance rates that were basically empty and more.

Some stories were hard-hitting investigations, others were reflective pieces that used data to shine light on what we weren’t paying attention to. All of them shared one goal: amplifying voices that needed to be heard.

Things I have learned…

What I learned at the State Department:

My “detour” through government service has only made me smarter. Working inside the system showed me how FOIA offices—supposedly there to serve the public with information—are shamefully understaffed.

I also realized that too many government workers saw the media as the enemy (that may be changing under the current administration). But it was always strange to me because every time a light is shined on something, the change can help all Americans have a government and system that works better for everyone. And that’s the media’s job, shine the light so there can be accountability and response.

What I learned running a business:

This past year of entrepreneurship and freelance work reinforced something I always suspected but never fully understood: your network really is everything. Whether I was securing consulting clients or trying to fund a media startup, it came down to the people who knew people.

I also learned that I really love service work. It is not my passion to be in the service of businesses. And in all work, but particularly entrepreneurship, passion is important.

The experience also taught me something crucial about modern journalism—you have to build your own brand. These days people trust individual reporters as much as (often times even more than) the outlet, so learning to promote your work and self, cut through the noise, and build your own following isn’t just helpful anymore, it’s essential.

Moving forward in Maryland…

Now I’m bringing all my knowledge and experience back to Maryland reporting, and I’m already diving deep.

As a Black girl who grew up in the South, I rarely saw Black political leadership. That’s part of what makes Maryland so fascinating to me as a reporter. It’s a place where race, identity, and politics constantly intersect, urban and rural, historic and rapidly changing. With the country’s only Black governor and one of the wealthiest Black communities in the country, Maryland offers a rare lens into shifting class and political power in America, and the complexities that come with it.

In addition, I’m also watching:

• school boundary debates in Montgomery County,

• Kilmar Abrego Garcia (at the heart of immigration and executive power flashpoints) is a Maryland resident,

• the challenging retail landscape in Prince George’s County,

• early rumblings of executive races,

• shifting demographics—my story list is overflowing, and I’m tracking it all.

Though I have covered the DMV as a reporter in the past, this time feels different. Having kids has given me a community connection I didn’t have before, and I want to tap into that more deeply. I want to be the kind of reporter who’s truly embedded, as a resident and parent.

In an era when local journalism faces unprecedented challenges, this work feels more like a calling than ever. For me it’s about democratizing access to information, holding power accountable, and making sure the stories that shape our shared future actually get told.

I’m ready to dig in. So, here’s an orange crush (that’s the state drink) to rigorous reporting, authentic storytelling, and serving this community.

And, I’m so happy to have this newsletter, where you all can get all the stories behind the stories.

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I hope you found this newsletter helpful and engaging. Please share with any friends or family you think would be interested and feel free to buy me a coffee by subscribing if you got some use out of it or make a one-time donation.

Follow me on Instagram too!

And here is my LinkedIn.

Order a signed copy of my sci-fi novel The Herd- When Democracy Falls.

And remember,…

What would a governance system based on ideological divides as opposed to geographical ones like the United States currently has look like? I have some thoughts.

I’m back diving deep into my twisted world-building rabbit hole for my post-apocalyptic trilogy The Herd (Book 1 is out, Book 2 is coming whether you're ready or not), and I thought I'd share some of the delightful process with you. Because nothing says “fun newsletter content” like exploring how America could fracture into ideological factions, right?

One of the first things you have to do when building a sci-fi or fantasy novel is world-building. For speculative fiction, this is easier because you're often pattern projecting—recognizing patterns in society and behavior, identifying a strong theme, and building around it. For me, that pattern was disinformation and ideological extremism (someone said I set my book too far in the future, lol).

The Faction Influence Map I created shows where the ideological strongholds end up after they take over in the form of factions. In the novel, the factions operate like states within a nation (if states had more power than the federal government), and the faction leaders are like more powerful versions of senators.

Think of the Herd world as what might happen when your family dinner political arguments become actual governing structures. It's representation by worldview rather than zip code.

Read or listen to 5 chapters for FREE!!!

The Faction Breakdown

There are many more ideologies I could have drawn from, but these are the factions I chose to create. I pulled most of these names from Latin:

Patriots: Extreme nationalists with quasi-eugenic tendencies. The description speaks for itself.

Tantum: The unaligned folks who said “nah, we’re good” to the whole faction thing. They´re concentrated along the East Coast, probably stress-eating bagels and complaining about everyone else.

Latus: The socially liberal crew. They’re the ones who’d probably have the best coffee shops in this dystopian hellscape.

Sumbolas: The communists hanging out in blue-collar territory. Picture Michigan but with more workers' councils and a collective healthcare system.

Divinus: Your friendly neighborhood theocracy, primarily Bible Belt-based.

Opes: The extreme capitalists who would literally sell your grandmother's kidney if the market offered enough for it.

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So What?

Creating a sci-fi world was an entertaining form of escape, but it also made me imagine where our current ideological extremes could lead us. That dark future is part of the Herd, but so is the hope that even in our twisted fate, there are people who still care about truth, integrity, and each other.

This weekend in the DMV, some people went to the President’s parade, but quite a few went out and protested the current system. I like to ask protesters: what world do they want to build instead?

World-building isn't just about becoming a sci-fi writer (though honestly, we could use more of those). It's about stretching your imagination muscle. Because if Americans can’t envision the future we want, how are we supposed to build it?

Coming Soon: The World Map (Because Apparently I Hate Sleep)

Next up, I'm building out the global map for this universe, and let me tell you, some of what I imagined is already starting to happen in real life. Which is either really good world-building or really concerning pattern recognition.

Probably both.

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I hope you found this newsletter helpful and engaging. Please share with any friends or family you think would be interested and feel free to buy me a coffee by subscribing if you got some use out of it or make a one-time donation.

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Follow me on Instagram too!

And here is my LinkedIn.

Order a signed copy of my sci-fi novel The Herd- When Democracy Falls.

And remember,…

As a local journalist, I've covered more parades than I can count. Pride parades, Puerto Rican parades, all kinds of cultural celebrations. My first news job was in New York City, and parade coverage was a biweekly affair in the summers.

But I learned from all those early morning setup shots and crowd interviews. Every parade taught me something new about the culture I was covering: the different dances, the music, how people celebrated their heritage in their own unique ways, right here in America.

And I think this is pretty unique to the United States. I've traveled and lived in several other countries, and I don't remember seeing the same kind of cultural parades for minority populations that we have here (happy to be corrected on this). There's something distinctly American about the way we let—or better yet, encourage—communities to celebrate who they are in public spaces.

Which is why the cancellation of the Salvadoran parade in Maryland because of ICE fears really matters. Are communities now afraid to publicly display their culture in this country? The headlines say some are.

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From Pride to Suppression

For many first and second generation Americans I’ve met, parades have been a way for them to connect with the other half of themselves, the part that is often reserved for home. Hidden.

It is as if the moment they change from their jeans and t-shirts to whatever cultural attire they normally wear, they are letting you in on a secret, showing you a glimpse of another part of themselves. At least that's how I felt watching people I knew dress up and show out at cultural celebrations.

In places like Montgomery County, Maryland where I live, or Houston, Texas where my mom is, cultural diversity is huge. The parades and celebrations are how local families display their pride in their heritage and maintain a sense of belonging to their communities.

But what happens when fear starts dictating which cultures get to be visible?

Even in Montgomery County, where the local government voices strong support for immigrant communities, people's lived experience appears to be changing. They're now scared of being the next Kimar Abrego Garcia, caught in a web of politics that may or may not have anything to do with them.

So What?

So what does it mean for these families when they don’t feel as if they can celebrate their culture publicly anymore? When your restaurants are “trouble spots,” when your cultural centers are seen as dangerous and threatening? How do you explain to your kids that celebrating who they are has become unsafe? I don’t have these answers, but these are questions worth pondering.

The U.S. has gone through ebbs and flows with immigrant hostility and discrimination in its history—think Japanese internment camps, deportations of the Irish, the list goes on. But my formative years in this country were marked by a system where multiple cultures seemed to coexist and celebrate openly.

I think about all those parades I covered as a young reporter. Each one was a story about people finding ways to be themselves in America. They were stories about belonging, about community, about the complexity of the American identity.

Now, I'm watching communities make what they describe as the tough decision to hide. This Salvadoran parade cancellation isn't just a Maryland story. It is the new American story. And right now, I'm not sure how it ends.

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Bonus: Nigerian Meat Pie Recipe (Cheat Version)

Now, a bit from my culture. Here’s how I make my quick and flavorful Nigerian meat pies, with a few time-saving hacks and some personal touches.

No measurements, just vibes. If you think too hard, you’ll mess it up.

Filling:

• About 1 lb ground beef

• 1 whole onion, diced

• 4–5 garlic cloves, chopped

• 1–2 carrots, chopped

• 1 zucchini, chopped (you can substitute yellow squash)

• Olive oil

• Salt to taste

Seasonings (to your heart’s content):

• Curry powder

• Turmeric

• Cumin

• Parsley

• Paprika

• Black pepper

• Oregano

• Red pepper flakes (optional – I skip this for my kids)

I don’t add potatoes to this filling because I’m not about that carb-on-carb life, but lots of Nigerian people do.

Sauté everything in olive oil—start with the onions and garlic, then brown the beef, then add the veggies and spices. Cook it down until everything is well-seasoned and soft. I usually make the filling the night before because I don’t like doing too much in one day.

Dough (cheat code):

• Trader Joe’s pizza dough

• A bit of flour (to firm it up—it’s too sticky straight from the bag)

• 1 Egg for coating

Roll it out, cut it into circles or squares, add the filling, and fold it over. Press the edges with a fork to seal. You can brush the tops with an egg wash if you want them glossy, but it’s optional.

Bake at 375–400°F until golden brown (about 25–30 minutes).

That’s it.

Delicious, savory, flaky, and kid-approved. It’s the Nigerian meat pie but faster, easier, and still packed with love.

Subscribe and Share

I hope you found this newsletter helpful and engaging. Please share with any friends or family you think would be interested and feel free to buy me a coffee by subscribing if you got some use out of it or make a one-time donation.

Subscribe now

Follow me on Instagram too!

And here is my LinkedIn.

Order a signed copy of my sci-fi novel The Herd- When Democracy Falls.